David Beckham, who recently played for the LA Galaxy, has delighted soccer fans across the world with his skills. His trademark scoring kick inspired the movie titled “Bend it like Beckham”. The main character of that film is a female teenager, whose family had emigrated from India to England. The clash of cultures and generations is played out, with the parents accepting their daughter’s assimilation of new affirming values. This movie was a hit, especially in our local Indian community, which is concentrated in the nearby city of Cerritos.

I am familiar with some aspects of the Indian culture, as I lived in London’s suburbs with large Indian and Pakistani populations. (I became especially fan of the Indian cuisine, as I got tired of the bland shepherd pies, fish and chips, eels, roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding.)

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Now let’s talk about gang rapes in India.

Cerritos includes one of the largest Indian and Pakistani populations in the USA. Lately the news about treatment of women from those countries has been shocking. In Pakistan, fourteen-year-old Malala Yousufzai, was nearly killed by the Taliban’s religious extremists because she was advocating for girl’s education. Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old Indian woman, who was in the midst of a miscarriage, was refused an abortion and died in an Irish hospital after suffering from blood poisoning. The recent gang rapes in India have reached repulsive savage levels, as the one which took place on a bus. According to news reports, the 23 year old student died from internal injuries inflicted with a metal rod during the rape.

“Indian women have made impressive gains in recent years: maternal mortality rates have dropped, literacy rates and education levels have risen, and millions of women have joined the professional classes. But the women at the heart of the protest movement say it was born of their outraged realization that no matter how accomplished they become, or how hard they work, women here will never fully take part in the promise of a new and more prosperous India unless something fundamental about the culture changes.

Indeed, many women in India say they are still subject to regular harassment and assault during the day and are fearful of leaving their homes alone after dark. Now they are demanding that the government, and a police force that they say offers women little or no protection, do something about it.

…While the Dec. 16 attack was extreme in its savagery, gang rapes of women have been happening with frightening regularity in recent months, particularly in northern India. Critics say the response from a mostly male police force is often inadequate at best.

Last week, an 18-year-old woman in Punjab State committed suicide by drinking poison after being raped by two men and then humiliated by male police officers, who made her describe her attack in detail several times, then tried to encourage her to marry one of her rapists. Dozens more gang rapes have been reported in the states of Haryana, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in recent months.

Sociologists and crime experts say the attacks are the result of deeply entrenched misogynistic attitudes and the rising visibility of women, underpinned by long-term demographic trends in India.

The New Delhi rape victim, whose funeral was held on Sunday, and whose name had not been revealed, was from a small village in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. Her journey to Delhi was the same that thousands of young women make every year to big cities around the country, in search of a better education and opportunities than their parents had. “My brother’s entire salary was spent on educating his children so that their aspirations were fulfilled,” the woman’s uncle told the newspaper The Hindu.”

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I hope that these horrible situations end soon, which will involve profound changes. As a writer for Slate magazine writes, “…almost as horrifying as the crimes themselves were the reactions of state police and politicians who, grappling to explain the outbreak of sexual violence, offered a set of truly bizarre viewpoints that make Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin look benign.”

I hope that David Beckham speaks out soon against India’s gang rapes.

While he’s thinking about it, please sign the Change.Org petition to Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and India’s Chief Justice:

About Ricardo Toro

7 Comments

This is a worthy cause, but I don’t see how Beckham is any more implicated to speak out on this than anyone else. It would be interesting to think about who should be called upon to speak out. Bear in mind that this may be the equivalent of asking a foreign leader or celebrity to speak out on something like comparative American overuse of fossil fuels — but even more undiplomatic. (That’s why, for example Obama might not speak to this, though I hope and expect that Hillary would.) Who else should be asked to do so?

*The Saudi Cleric which issued the “Fatwa” which OK’d Gang Rape and every one of the protagonists should be the victims of “Summary Execution”. Sending a strong message…..is far better than having Lindsay Lohan or any celebrity make a You Tube Video demanding justice for women…in our opinion in the world

“While US commentators report on the abysmal state of Indian women, American women also face extremely high rates of rape and sexual assault, and antiquated rape laws still remain on the books, making justice elusive for rape victims. For example, right here in Los Angeles this past Friday a three judge Appeals Court panel reversed a rape conviction after learning that the woman who was raped was not married. The judges cited a law put onto the books in 1872 which states that it is only rape if the rapist is pretending to be someone’s husband and tricks the woman into having sex. Therefore if the rape victim is unmarried, according to this antiquated law, sexual assaults against her are not considered rape. ”

Your explanation of the decision is not quite accurate; the opinion is well worth reading. The court did not say that an unmarried woman cannot be sexual assault. It said that the specific statutory establishing the crime of “rape by impersonation,” which on its face limits itself to impersonation of one’s spouse, did not apply when the impersonation was of someone other than a spouse. And then the court went out of its way to call for a revision in the language of the statute.

Rape by impersonation is a tricky crime to address because the behavior of the victim is to acquiesce in the sexual act, despite that she (usually it’s a she) would not do so if the identity of the person seeking sex were clear. This leads to thorny factual questions from a jury about whether or not there truly was confusion about identity (which was raised here in the defense) or whether the woman was agreeing to sex with someone because she was attracted to him (usually it’s a him) — and whether the person seeking sex should have known that it was a case of mistaken identity. Women, like men, are perfectly capable of wanting to have sex with relative strangers (or at least with people other than their customary partners.) In this case, the jury had good reason to decide that the man in jail — who has already served his entire sentence, by the way — did know that the woman in question had good reason to believe that if anyone started caressing her where she lay, that it would be her boyfriend. (The man claimed that she was conscious from the start; she claimed otherwise — and of course if she was unconscious then there was no possibility of identity confusion and it would have inarguably been rape.)

I think that the law has to be updated to reflect that someone in a monogamous relationship should have the same protection from rape by impersonation as one who is married. I’d like it to be updated beyond that to all acts of impersonation, but we should recognize that certain problems arise. If a woman, in a given period of time, has several boyfriends — that is, men with whom she would willingly agree to have sex — then how is a man seeking sex supposed to know that he doesn’t fall into that category? In such a situation, there would be a lower burden on the man to know that he was being given sexual access due to a mistake of fact and a higher burden on the woman, even if groggy, to know who was asking for sex before consenting to it.

If this strikes anyone as harsh, try reversing the genders. We have no problem imagining a man who may have many “girlfriends” (under the “willingness to have sex with” definition used above) at a given moment. Let’s say that there are, say, nine of them. Is a tenth woman who sneaks into the guy’s bed naked — let’s say that he’s Rod Stewart in the late ’70s, just to make it more plausible — and lets him assume that she’s one of the nine “approved” partners guilty of rape-by-impersonation? My guess is: unless he tries to find out who she is before having sex with her, probably not. Then we have the situation of “sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.” So how does one write the law so that all and only the “right” people are convicted? I don’t know — but I suspect that it’s less straightforward than people imagine.

Rape-by-impersonation has the potential to be expanded to the point where it becomes a problem. If you don’t limit it to a spouse (and, we can probably agree, a steady boyfriend or girlfriend), then can one be accused of it not for impersonating a particular someone, but a member of a group to which one doesn’t belong — a doctor, a liberal, a vegetarian, an unmarried person? This recently became an issue in Israel, when a man met a woman at a party and they ended up having sex. The problem was that she was Jewish and he was an Arab Muslim, though he didn’t volunteer that information, and she would not have wanted to have sex with him had she known his religion (and maybe even his ethnicity.) I forget whether it was a civil or a criminal case, but either way he was found to have committed rape by impersonation. To me, that shows that the principle of sexual self-determination can go too far if not accompanied by some obligation of due diligence.

I don’t mean to aim this at you, Ricardo, but the action of this court is not in the same ballpark — or town, county, state, country, continent, planet, galaxy, or universe — as the vile actions that took place in India. They cannot and should not be lumped in any category when it comes to diminishing women’s rights. The court was trying to do its job — and did so under difficult circumstances, including probably knowing that the case would be misunderstood and that a storm of criticism would be coming its way.

Greg, thanks for your feedback. I completely agree with you that the action of the court is not in the same ballpark as the vile action that took place in India.

The comments regarding the LA Appeals Court panel reversal of a rape conviction, after learning that the woman who was raped was not married, were not mine. I quoted the conversation between radio host Sonali Kolhatkar interviewing Katie Buckland, Executive Director of the California Women’s Law Center. Ms Buckland, who is lawyer, would not have overturned the rape conviction. I will ask Vern to insert the video of the conversation, to give a fuller picture of her position.